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Comment by rurp | Hacker News Reader

Another big negative I think is underconsidered is that a Google owned self driving car fleet will be absolutely plastered with video ads and physical user tracking if they dominate the market enough to get away with it.

Imagine those unmutable video ads that are increasingly common at gas stations, but running constantly inside the car.

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They already have those video ads in a lot of taxis. And of course public transit has been plastered with paper ads for decades now. So what you're describing isn't much of a change from the status quo. Unless you believe the advent of self-driving cars will lead to people being okay with ads in the vehicles they own or lease themselves, which I think is highly unlikely.

As an aside, usually those gas station ads are mutable. There are unlabeled buttons on the sides of the monitor - press them. One of them mutes it. I have yet to find a gas station at which this won’t work.

It's feels like it's about 50/50 on whether or not that button is broken when I pull up to one of those pumps.

You mean like the (sometimes unmutable) video ads I've seen in practically every traditional taxi for years now?

That ship sailed a while ago and didn't need Google to push it.

Gmail is not like this, and Gmail is free. Waymo will not want to degrade a paid experience with intrusive ads anymore than Uber or Lyft do.

Gmail isn’t like this because they read all of your emails

Google stopped using information from emails as part of ad selection years ago, the ads shown in Gmail are based entirely on the other ad personalization data they have from other Google properties. They obviously still parse email contents for spam blocking and such, but that seems like a necessary part of running any webmail service, and not a profit center for them.

I guess it's always possible that they're lying about it, but given the depth of the regulatory and public relations fiasco that would cause I'd be very surprised.

This is not true: https://support.google.com/mail/answer/10434152?hl=en#:~:tex....

"adblock detected! It is a violation of our terms of service to wear noise cancelling earphones, pulling over."

Windows has ads (and you pay for it), Chrome OS and android have never had ads, so it doesn’t follow that Waymo will have ads due to Google.

Chrome OS and Android are surveillance/data capture platforms designed to funnel data to an advertising giant, including being caught secretly sending location data against users wishes more than once.

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